Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Christian homemakers need encouragement and motivation to stay the course. Homemaking and homeschooling can feel overwhelming, but they don’t have to be. If you’re a Christian mom longing for a well-ordered home, a peaceful homeschool, and a joyful heart—without the stress or burnout—you’re in the right place. Moms can be productive and peaceful when grounded in Scriptural truth.
I’m Mystie Winckler, homeschooling mom of five, founder of Simply Convivial, and your guide to managing both home and heart with faith and focus. Here, we talk about biblical homemaking, sustainable homeschooling, and cheerful productivity—all through the lens of organizing your attitude and embracing your God-given calling.
In each episode, you’ll find practical homemaking systems, homeschooling strategies, and mindset shifts that will help you manage your home without perfectionism or frustration. We’ll tackle topics like:
✔️ Christian homemaking routines that actually work
✔️ Productivity, mom-style
✔️ Homeschooling with peace—even when life gets messy
✔️ Time management for moms (without rigid schedules)
✔️ Decluttering your home & your attitude
✔️ How to be diligent, not just busy
Motherhood is a marathon, not a sprint. You don’t need more willpower—you need a grace-filled, biblical approach to managing life at home. Let’s cultivate faithfulness, embrace joy, and build habits that make home a place of peace and purpose.
👉 Subscribe now and start organizing your home and heart—cheerfully.
Speaker: Have you ever looked around
your house and thought, "How did
everything get this out of control?"
Now, the dishes aren't really the problem.
The laundry isn't really the problem.
The overflowing inbox, the
forgotten appointments, the
constant feeling like you're behind,
these aren't the real problem.
I know that when my life starts to feel
chaotic, my instinct is generally the
same; clean the kitchen, reorganize the
pantry, buy another planner, make an
enormous list of every project that I've
been avoiding for the last six months.
But I've learned something
Working harder doesn't get me
back on track most of the time.
What I need before I work harder is to
stop and make a few simple decisions
so that I actually get the right things
done instead of simply piling on the busy
There are four key decisions that I
have to make to make sure that we're
getting the right things on track, the
things that will affect every normal day.
What makes a normal day?
Those are the key decisions that we're
going to make, four key decisions, that
if you put them into place you can reset
In about two focused hours, less for
me now because I'm practiced at this
routine, I can answer these questions
on paper, even on index cards, and build
a simple framework for the life that I
am living and that I should be living.
No weekend whole house reset, no massive
decluttering necessary, and definitely
no getting caught up, whatever that
means Just a handful of decisions that
make real life feel dramatically easier.
In this episode, I'm going to
walk you through the four systems
that I reset every time life
starts to feel overwhelming
or even just when life changes
These two hours save me dozens
more in the weeks that follow
Hi, I'm Misty Winkler, and you've
found the Christian homemaking
podcast, Simply Convivial.
I'm a mom, homemaker, homeschool mom.
I'm a homeschool mom, homemaker,
and author of the book Simplified
Organization: Learn to Love What Must be
Done, and also, Home is for Hospitality:
Why Your Home and Homemaking Matter
And I know that you look around your house
and think that everything is terrible,
no good, needs to be redone, reorganized
right now before school starts again.
I know that when I start to feel
that way, I want maybe a few
silent hours away, an empty house.
I want to clear out every
closet and reorganize them
with matching bins and labels.
I maybe need a whole personality change
for this home to function properly.
I start to overcomplicate things,
and I bet you do too The most useful
home reset is not to spend hours
cleaning and organizing everything,
as if that was going to happen, or
even spending hours trying to get
to that mythical caught up stage.
The real useful reset that we
need, especially as seasons
change, is thought work.
Paperwork really, but
intentional paperwork.
Not filling in somebody else's blanks,
but thinking through your week and
pre-making some key decisions that will
make everything roll out more smoothly.
You wanna sit down with
your calendar, a notebook
and probably a good cup of coffee.
And then make some key decisions that
maybe you've been postponing, maybe
you've never made ahead of time before,
but some key decisions that then
you will regularly follow through on
not because you've engineered the
perfect routine, but because you've
set enough of a basic structure that
recurring unresolved questions can stop
draining your attention every day Now,
I have managed a home, homeschooled
five kids, written books, run a
business through many different seasons.
And the routines that are working
for my life now are not the same
ones as those that I had when I
had five young children at home.
The structure has to change when
life changes, and we each have to
adapt and evolve a home routine
that works for our current season
and each of our current realities.
You can't just copy and paste
someone else's plan or routine
or system into your own life.
You have to actually stop and think and
pray and write things down for your own
life And here are four areas that you
can think through, write a plan through,
and walk away with a routine structure
that will help you calmly manage your
real life as this new season unfolds
the four key areas, the four areas that
you are gonna make some key decisions
in are your calendar and time budget,
your morning and evening routines, your
personal habits, and a meal strategy,
which is totally different from a meal
plan, and we'll get to that one last.
I'm also going to be teaching a live
class walking you through this process
live together bit by bit, answering
questions along the way so that you
will come out with, in 90 minutes with
a full plan to go into the school year
with your basic structure in place The
details are linked below, or you can go
right now to simplyconvivial.com/reset.
That's simplyconvivial.com/reset
to join me for that
For now, let's start with the most
important organization piece that you
can set up, and that is your calendar.
And then a time budget is not
a schedule, but it is a way to
thoughtfully manage our time.
So the first thing we're going
to reset is our calendar.
Your routines of any kind cannot
fit into time that has already
been promised somewhere else.
Sometimes we think that if we just
have the right planner or make the
right list, then everything will
magically fit into time, as if time is
a ever-expanding resource that we have.
But time is very limited.
We have to manage it thoughtfully
and intentionally, or else the
important things will not have room.
They will not fit.
So we have to put first things
first when it comes to our calendar
Now, I have a previous episode all
about the five rules of managing your
calendar well and keeping it accurate
and up to date as your most important
organization tool, and I'll link
that at the end or in the show notes.
But for now, what we wanna do is look
at our calendars and make sure that for
the next month or two at a bare minimum,
every time-bound obligation, every
appointment, every class, everything where
we have to be somewhere doing something
at a particular time, at a particular
place, needs to be on the calendar.
You wanna get that entirely up to date.
This will give you the real framework
that you are working in with your home
Then around those actual appointments
that you have on the calendar,
you wanna create a time budget.
I have a free time budget template
that you can grab in the description
below but my time budget, I
just make on Google Calendar.
I use Google Calendar for my master
calendar, where everything goes on.
This makes it easy to share
with my kids and my husband, and
for them to share it with me.
And then I create a second calendar
in a different color that's not always
turned on that is called time budget,
and this is where I build in the basic
blocks of work that needs to happen, or
responsibilities that need to happen.
If I want to be reading every day,
that goes in a block on my time budget.
If I need to go grocery shopping once
a week, that actually needs to go in
the time budget, along with enough time
built in to put those groceries away.
We can't do everything that we would
like to do, and a time budget, just
like a money budget, is a way to be
honest with ourselves about where we
want our time to be going and what
actually fits in our days and our weeks.
Now, a time budget looks at a week
as a whole, 168 hours, which is
a very reasonable amount of time.
You can't do everything every
day, but over the course
of a week, what can you do?
Maybe reading is something
that's important to you, but you
really can't manage it every day.
Maybe it could happen two or three
times a week, but then the other
day, a grocery shopping trip or a kid
activity has to happen in that block.
That's totally okay, and a
time budget allows you to make
those kind of judgment calls.
And it's not a schedule.
It's not like you have to on the
dot switch to the next thing, but
rather you're thinking of your
time in more chunks, like a school
block, not scheduling out every 15
minutes and thinking that you're
gonna change as the clock chimes.
But rather, what have you planned to do?
How much do you estimate that will take?
And then have you over-planned for
the number of hours you actually have?
Have you planned so much schoolwork
that you're going to be doing
school from 9:00 to 4:00 every day,
and is that really what you want?
You have to make some hard decisions,
and a time budget helps you think in a
big picture about what you are actually
prioritizing, what really needs to
happen, and you make some of those
give and take decisions The time budget
takes some time to think through and
work through, but it pays dividends in
making some decisions upfront about what
actually fits and what you're trying for.
So that is your calendar and time budget.
The first thing that you want to reset.
The second thing is your
morning and evening routines.
Now, what I recommend for
morning and evening routines
is to have 15 minutes for each.
You are not gonna try to get all
the housework done before 10:00 AM
or have everything put together in
the evening before you go to bed.
Those are ideals.
And as homeschooling moms with busy
families and busy lives, we are not
trying to achieve the ideal every day
We want instead to commit to
a bare minimum that is a bare
minimum that makes a difference.
The kind of bare minimum that becomes
an anchor point where we actually can
build on top of it as we go along.
Because we're not continually shooting
for an ideal and always falling short and
feeling bad, we're actually getting to the
most important tasks, and so everything
else is gravy and feels great because
we're doing more than we set out to do
And even if we don't, the things
that we have done are the things
that make the biggest difference.
So the way that you come up with the
items that make the biggest difference,
'cause it's not gonna be immediately
obvious, make a list of all the chores
that you think should be done in the
morning and all the chores that you
think should be done in the evening.
Go with that ideal.
List it all out Give a time
estimate for each one of those.
Then your morning and evening
routine can each be only 15 minutes.
One way to keep your morning and evening
routine 15 minutes or less is to choose,
say is to not put down clean the kitchen
as your evening chore, but rather say,
"Spend 10 minutes cleaning the kitchen."
Because if you go into the kitchen
knowing you're only gonna clean it for
10 minutes, you will do the things that
will make the biggest difference first.
You won't get sidetracked or distracted
in going all after one corner, but
you'll do the big things first.
You'll get the main strokes done, and
if you get those done consistently-
Disorder doesn't spread.
You're maintaining a basic base level
tidiness that allows you to work from
a place of order instead of chaos, and
gradually that minimum will get you
farther and farther because you're always
resetting to that minimum day after day.
It's never so much that you think,
"Ah, I just don't have time for it."
You say, "It's 15 minutes," and it is
going to be such an incredible help
that it is worth that 15 minutes,
and you'll be committed to it as
soon as you start to see it build.
So set a 15-minute morning routine
and a 15-minute evening routine.
What goes into those 15 minutes is gonna
be different for every family, and even
for the family, it's gonna be different
during different seasons, especially
depending on what kind of morning or
after dinner chores your kids are doing.
You wanna fill in with your own 15
minutes the tasks that are going to
help you reset the space for usefulness,
for functionality at the end, at the
beginning, or at the end of the day
And then on your list or on your index
card, you're just gonna write out.
Probably it's gonna be no more than
three items on each of those lists.
My morning routine is five
minutes in my bedroom.
I start with making my bed, and
then I spend the rest of the
five minutes cleaning up whatever
catches my eye or needs to be done.
Five minutes of a general house EHAP,
and then I start a load of laundry
That's my morning routine That can be
done no matter how little time I have
in the morning, and it makes a huge
difference in how the home functions.
And then my evening routine is
to get the dishwasher started.
The kids clear the table,
load the dishwasher.
I help put food away, and then I make
sure that the dishwasher has everything
that could fit in it and put in properly,
and then I start the dishwasher.
I make sure that the table is
clear and actually clean, so
it's set to go in the morning.
And then I give the floor a quick wipe.
Notâ¦
It's not a full mop most of the time.
It's just getting a cloth damp with, maybe
with a little cleaner, maybe not, and
usually just using my foot, 'cause our
kitchen is really small right now, and
I can just foot mop it in a few minutes
So that's your basic
morning and evening routine.
If you make those decisions, you
get that in place, then you have
your bare minimum home routine that
will help keep everything running
so after you have your morning and
your evening routine figured out,
at least on paper, of course you'll
try it out and iterate it as you go
along, but having thought about it
and come up with a great starting
point is going to get you way ahead.
Then you have two left.
The next one is your personal habits.
But don't forget, the last one
is kind of the most important
one, that meal strategy.
So stay tuned
You don't wanna forget your personal
habits, your Bible reading, prayer
time, and time to read yourself
and time to read real books
Having these personal habits in
place will make a huge difference
when it comes to your mental and
emotional ability to handle real life.
And these are the things that tend to be
neglected, and these are the things that
we tend to neglect when time feels short.
It is just a feeling because probably if
you looked at your screen time, you would
see that you have plenty of spare time.
You're just not using it properly.
So you want to have places in your day,
anchors in your day for these personal
habits so that your screen time gets
short-changed rather than your soul
It's a great idea to have a plan A
and a plan B when it comes to Bible
reading, prayer time, and reading books.
Because days go haywire, and we are
needed at different times for different
things in ways we can't predict as moms.
So while we do want to have an ideal
spot, you know, a first thing spot in
our day for it, we also need a backup
plan B option because things happen.
A child wakes up vomiting or whatever,
whatever throws off our mornings.
We don't wanna use that as an excuse to
say, "Well, now because I didn't have
that first thing in the morning time,
I'm just not gonna read my Bible today.
I'm just not gonna pray today.
I'm just going to fly by the
seat of my pants and be reactive
the whole rest of the day."
We do not want that.
We want to be proactive, and we
want to use our time intentionally.
And when we take the time
to read our Bible, pray,
and read good books, we will become the
kind of people who can be intentional and
proactive about our day because our mind
and our spirit are engaged in a way that
makes us more productive
and also more wise
Spending more time on our phones will
disconnect us from our real life, while
spending time in the Word, in prayer,
and in good ideas will anchor us and
make us the kind of women who have
something useful to say and do all day
So give yourself a plan A and a
plan B when it comes to reading your
Bible, praying, and reading real books
All right, so we finally come to the
last thing that you're gonna figure
out, which is your meal strategy.
Now, too often we overcomplicate
meal planning, and we want
everything to come out just right.
We want the budget to come out right,
along with the health and nutrition,
along with the less time needed in the
kitchen and grocery shopping, and then
we have to have the recipes and the
lists, and we have all of these moving
pieces that we're trying to arrange
into some sort of elaborate system
that will suddenly make it all work.
We're gonna give up on that kind of menu
planning, and we're also going to give up
on the kind of menu planning that just has
us browsing recipes for hours upon hours.
You see, the reality is that throughout
time, and even now in other parts of
the world, people eat much less variety
than we are used to as Americans.
You do not have to have a brand-new dinner
to eat every single day, week after week.
That's not how you create
traditions or family favorites.
That's not how you come up with
signature dishes of your own.
These are things that you're known for
because you've served them over and over
An example of this in our
family is Saturday pancakes.
My mom made pancakes every Saturday
when I was growing up, and my
husband's dad made pancakes every
Saturday when he was growing up.
And so of course, Saturday is pancake day.
And now our son is carrying
that on in his family.
It's just normal.
It's just what we do.
Pancakes on Saturday.
No thinking necessary.
This is now a family tradition
It's a shortcut.
It's a decision that doesn't
even have to be made.
It's a norm, and they are
handy for keeping life rolling
and cheerful and connected.
So your meal strategy is some kind
of routine decision for each day of
the week, things like Taco Tuesday
or Pizza Friday, Chicken Monday.
These just shortcuts help us have a base
that we can add variety to and change up
as we go, but we already have a starting
point, so we're not starting from scratch.
We're not grocery shopping brand-new
lists all the time, and we're not
browsing a bunch of new recipes
every time we sit down to meal plan.
We're not overthinking it
or overcomplicating it.
We have maybe some mild variation, but
we do the same thing over and over again
This also includes having regular
weekday breakfasts, regular lunch options
the key to the MEAL strategy is that
you're pre-making some decisions
and really formulating family
traditions without overcomplicating
it and overthinking it.
This streamlines and simplifies
dinner while making it a better
connection point for your family,
which is a key part of a family dinner
and one of the reasons to prioritize it
and help it actually happen
I know that these four areas
sound maybe oversimplified.
Like, this isn't gonna make that big of a
difference, or this isn't gonna take two
hours to figure out, and maybe it won't.
But reserve two hours to think it through,
to write it out, and to streamline
and to create a basic structure for
your week so that you have a good
rhythm, a daily rhythm and a weekly
rhythm that your family can depend upon
Being organized boils down to being
prepared and able to handle your
own real life, and making these
decisions ahead of time is what helps
us lay that groundwork for being
prepared and handling our real life
You see, productivity and organization
is not about moving faster or
being busier, but about clearing
the obstacles to regular rhythms
Decluttering our overthinking and
creating paths for us to walk in
that build the kind of life that
we want to build for our families.
These decisions remove obstacles from that
path of building up our homes and family
life cheerfully to the glory of God.
You don't need a lot of details.
It doesn't need to be
fancy or complicated.
In fact, it shouldn't be.
But we do need some structure to work
with on a daily and weekly basis.
And written out in a clear, simple
framework will help you take real
action day over day and build
traction and momentum in your life
Now, if you're interested in getting
my help actually walking through
this process, spending 90 minutes to
two hours perhaps spending about 90
minutes working through this process
and creating a written plan with
worksheets for this weekly structure,
Then join my Chaos to Consistency 90
Minute Reset Together we'll go through
this process and create it on paper
and I'll be answering your questions
and helping you make those decisions
and get them written out in a way
that makes it actionable and doable.
You can find out more information
about that reset by going to
simplyconvivial.com/reset.
Simplyconvivial.com/reset,
and I'll also have the link in
the description on this episode
I would love to hear in the comments
too, which of these four areas is the
one you need to put the most thought
into to make it work better in your
life, to move from chaos to consistency?
You don't need to complete every
project or clean every room or catch up.
You need to make a few
foundational decisions,
And these four areas are key
to building that foundation
You need this foundation, and of course,
you also need to repent, rejoice, repeat